Carbon fiber composites offer high strength-to-weight ratios for aircraft design and are increasingly used on modern aircraft. It is desirable to understand the behavior of resins in composites when subjected to lightning strikes to better select materials, determine lightning thresholds, and design protection schemes for aircraft. The use of traditional lightning tests for evaluating the performance of resins can be time-consuming, and may be cost-prohibitive for effectively screening the wide variety of composite resins available for use.